(no subject)
Icon meme from morgeil:
1. Reply to this post, and I will pick four of your icons.
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon squee!
1. One result of my becoming attached to The Dresden Files was a frantic search for icon-suitable pictures of Bob. The base for this icon was an off-set photo of Terrence Mann which I immediately latched onto because let's face it, that smile is brilliant. The text, were you free, is a quote from the episode "Things That Go Bump".
2. NCIS! Gibbs and Abby! Squinting at the camera! I love this show to bits for about ten million reasons, and one of them is the unutterably cute father-daughter vibe between Abby and Gibbs. In fact, Gibbs is pretty much the father of the whole team (always allowing Ducky the position of favored uncle), but it's clearest with Abby and Tony; Gibbs-DiNozzo mentorfic was actually what hooked me on the fandom, but that's another story. I must also thank wens for the background.
3. Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. This is one of my older icons, circa '05 or something like that; I had only recently become aware of the Brett Holmes, my previous knowledge being limited to Rathbone and various minor one-shot actors. Brett is not my ideal Holmes -- that title goes to Clive Merrison -- but he does get very close, especially in his earlier work. The text is rather random; I am especially proud of it during the small hours when my brain is going Hmmmm~. And the bricks... I don't remember why I did that. *grins*
4. Ah, Kakashi-sensei -- the famed Copy-Nin who mastered thousands of techniques just by watching them. When I made this icon, I was working as a secretary in a law office, a job which involved very little law and quite a lot of standing over a whining copy machine; the pun followed very naturally. Surprisingly, it didn't take much time to match up the character with a unit photographed from the right perspective, and some Photoshop effects did the rest.
(For clarity's sake, a comment to this post doesn't have to be part of the meme unless requested by the commenter.)
I know this one has been going around, but what with one thing and another, can't remember where I've seen it or what the exact parameters are. In any case: here are ten items from my personal Gallifrey canon.
1. Most Time Lords are not grown in test tubes. Likely children are culled from the huddled masses, made to look into the Time Vortex, and then trained by the schools for which they show aptitude.
2. All Gallifreyans have massive lifespans and the ability to regenerate. Unfortunately, the civilization which left a Death Zone dormant on the face of its own planet lacked the organizational energies to train the lower classes for the ordeal; the idiots and unrecognizable mutants produced by bad regenerations are part of what held the less fortunate in the state of intellectual malaise and near-feudal poverty that would leave them of little use when the planet was finally attacked.
3. Compared against the overall population of Gallifrey, Time Lords were a startlingly small minority. They considered themselves a race apart by measurable standards of intellect and left their responsibility for the rest of the planet idle in the face of the immense task of secretly regulating the history of the known universe. This was monumentally unwise, but it worked for so long that at the end, the rogues who dared question tradition were powerless to change it.
4. The Laws of Time are more like guidelines, really.
5. And the Time Lords are capable of discussing their implications, rationalizations, morals, values, and policies ad infinitum even as the walls of their palaces rain in around them.
6. Rassilon the Immortal died with the Eye of Harmony. Only he didn't really die -- he was sucked into the other side, joined forces with Omega's wraith, rebuilt the technology from the other side, and awaits the proper time to deploy a board of ghosts for his next and most secret game.
7. Another thing that died with the Eye was the quasi-telepathic state that bound all Time Lords together. Actually a little-known side effect of the conditions binding that singularity to the Vortex, the Matrix, and the mind of every Time Lord that had ever been touched by those infinities, its absence left its survivors with an impossible, gaping wound in their minds where the severed connection feels like the death of everything they ever knew. Time Lords are, of course, highly telepathic on their own, but strict mental training leaves them with unconscious shields against one another, so that even together each is mind-blind to every other without the alternate channel once provided by the Eye.
8. The number of Time Lords, not to mention Gallifreyans, to escape the Time War was staggering, which the Doctor might have known had he maintained more interest in the history of his planet. He was hardly the first to abandon his post; many could not be found, and many failed to answer the President's summons, though these defections were hushed up in order to present a united face to the Daleks. As the Time War's complications burned through the lost history of Gallifrey's future alliances, they escaped in all directions, each believing that no other Time Lord was left alive. As the universe is a very big place, very few of them ever realized their mistake.
9. Gallifrey's death, once a mind-broken renegade slipped into her greatest city and disabled the transduction barrier, was a simple matter. Huddled in the domes as the Daleks razed the surface, the Time Lords tried again and again to correct their own past until their last defenses were crushed under a terrible weight of paradox and the weakest ones were driven mad by the relentless superiority of Dalek rhetoric that had overwhelmed all their channels of communication. At the last minute the Doctor destroyed the Eye of Harmony to prevent the Daleks from gaining access to time travel, accepting in his own mind the consequences to himself and his people. Briefly unbound before the core of its singularity could be scattered, the Eye released a gravity wave into Gallifrey's solar system which destabilized its suns. The supernova wiped the Dalek fleet from the universe and reduced the besieged planet to a black, twisted cinder caught in a web of nascent black holes. The temporal distortion, together with the latent paradoxes caused by the Time Lords' futile attempts to change their fate, made it impossible to prevent the disaster by going back in time.
10. From the right angles, the right physical and temporal coordinates, it is possible to see Gallifrey's suns still shining into history, glowing steadily until the premature supernova blots them out. The Doctor knows without trying that he cannot get too close. He is too bound to the planet's fate, his implications scattered by the explosion through the timelessness of its past, to do more than fade through a colorless phantom of its former life, to touch a tenuous memory of its place in the galaxy, unknowable and insubstantial as a ghost -- if any ship would survive the journey to the heart of the darkness he left behind. He doesn't wonder why, during these rare windows of vision, he never encounters past or future selves on the same memorial pilgrimage. He also doesn't wonder how he survived, how he escaped, and whether it was the destruction or something else, too terrible to remember, that had finally stopped his hearts.
00. He drifted for months through the remnants of the Time War before finally, reluctantly, acknowledging his own survival. The name he took back from the legends of his own life fit painfully over the scars of his deed. In the end he took it because he could -- and because in filling a minute part of the hole he had left in the universe, his smallness and singularity remained as eternal proof that the hole was there. More title now than name, it stamps his activities so indelibly that he scarcely hears it at all.
Who, they wonder? The Doctor.
Someday, perhaps, he will remember to wonder too.
OK, that's it for tonight. Next post may contain actual content. Ye cats.
1. Reply to this post, and I will pick four of your icons.
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon squee!
1. One result of my becoming attached to The Dresden Files was a frantic search for icon-suitable pictures of Bob. The base for this icon was an off-set photo of Terrence Mann which I immediately latched onto because let's face it, that smile is brilliant. The text, were you free, is a quote from the episode "Things That Go Bump".
2. NCIS! Gibbs and Abby! Squinting at the camera! I love this show to bits for about ten million reasons, and one of them is the unutterably cute father-daughter vibe between Abby and Gibbs. In fact, Gibbs is pretty much the father of the whole team (always allowing Ducky the position of favored uncle), but it's clearest with Abby and Tony; Gibbs-DiNozzo mentorfic was actually what hooked me on the fandom, but that's another story. I must also thank wens for the background.
3. Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. This is one of my older icons, circa '05 or something like that; I had only recently become aware of the Brett Holmes, my previous knowledge being limited to Rathbone and various minor one-shot actors. Brett is not my ideal Holmes -- that title goes to Clive Merrison -- but he does get very close, especially in his earlier work. The text is rather random; I am especially proud of it during the small hours when my brain is going Hmmmm~. And the bricks... I don't remember why I did that. *grins*
4. Ah, Kakashi-sensei -- the famed Copy-Nin who mastered thousands of techniques just by watching them. When I made this icon, I was working as a secretary in a law office, a job which involved very little law and quite a lot of standing over a whining copy machine; the pun followed very naturally. Surprisingly, it didn't take much time to match up the character with a unit photographed from the right perspective, and some Photoshop effects did the rest.
(For clarity's sake, a comment to this post doesn't have to be part of the meme unless requested by the commenter.)
I know this one has been going around, but what with one thing and another, can't remember where I've seen it or what the exact parameters are. In any case: here are ten items from my personal Gallifrey canon.
1. Most Time Lords are not grown in test tubes. Likely children are culled from the huddled masses, made to look into the Time Vortex, and then trained by the schools for which they show aptitude.
2. All Gallifreyans have massive lifespans and the ability to regenerate. Unfortunately, the civilization which left a Death Zone dormant on the face of its own planet lacked the organizational energies to train the lower classes for the ordeal; the idiots and unrecognizable mutants produced by bad regenerations are part of what held the less fortunate in the state of intellectual malaise and near-feudal poverty that would leave them of little use when the planet was finally attacked.
3. Compared against the overall population of Gallifrey, Time Lords were a startlingly small minority. They considered themselves a race apart by measurable standards of intellect and left their responsibility for the rest of the planet idle in the face of the immense task of secretly regulating the history of the known universe. This was monumentally unwise, but it worked for so long that at the end, the rogues who dared question tradition were powerless to change it.
4. The Laws of Time are more like guidelines, really.
5. And the Time Lords are capable of discussing their implications, rationalizations, morals, values, and policies ad infinitum even as the walls of their palaces rain in around them.
6. Rassilon the Immortal died with the Eye of Harmony. Only he didn't really die -- he was sucked into the other side, joined forces with Omega's wraith, rebuilt the technology from the other side, and awaits the proper time to deploy a board of ghosts for his next and most secret game.
7. Another thing that died with the Eye was the quasi-telepathic state that bound all Time Lords together. Actually a little-known side effect of the conditions binding that singularity to the Vortex, the Matrix, and the mind of every Time Lord that had ever been touched by those infinities, its absence left its survivors with an impossible, gaping wound in their minds where the severed connection feels like the death of everything they ever knew. Time Lords are, of course, highly telepathic on their own, but strict mental training leaves them with unconscious shields against one another, so that even together each is mind-blind to every other without the alternate channel once provided by the Eye.
8. The number of Time Lords, not to mention Gallifreyans, to escape the Time War was staggering, which the Doctor might have known had he maintained more interest in the history of his planet. He was hardly the first to abandon his post; many could not be found, and many failed to answer the President's summons, though these defections were hushed up in order to present a united face to the Daleks. As the Time War's complications burned through the lost history of Gallifrey's future alliances, they escaped in all directions, each believing that no other Time Lord was left alive. As the universe is a very big place, very few of them ever realized their mistake.
9. Gallifrey's death, once a mind-broken renegade slipped into her greatest city and disabled the transduction barrier, was a simple matter. Huddled in the domes as the Daleks razed the surface, the Time Lords tried again and again to correct their own past until their last defenses were crushed under a terrible weight of paradox and the weakest ones were driven mad by the relentless superiority of Dalek rhetoric that had overwhelmed all their channels of communication. At the last minute the Doctor destroyed the Eye of Harmony to prevent the Daleks from gaining access to time travel, accepting in his own mind the consequences to himself and his people. Briefly unbound before the core of its singularity could be scattered, the Eye released a gravity wave into Gallifrey's solar system which destabilized its suns. The supernova wiped the Dalek fleet from the universe and reduced the besieged planet to a black, twisted cinder caught in a web of nascent black holes. The temporal distortion, together with the latent paradoxes caused by the Time Lords' futile attempts to change their fate, made it impossible to prevent the disaster by going back in time.
10. From the right angles, the right physical and temporal coordinates, it is possible to see Gallifrey's suns still shining into history, glowing steadily until the premature supernova blots them out. The Doctor knows without trying that he cannot get too close. He is too bound to the planet's fate, his implications scattered by the explosion through the timelessness of its past, to do more than fade through a colorless phantom of its former life, to touch a tenuous memory of its place in the galaxy, unknowable and insubstantial as a ghost -- if any ship would survive the journey to the heart of the darkness he left behind. He doesn't wonder why, during these rare windows of vision, he never encounters past or future selves on the same memorial pilgrimage. He also doesn't wonder how he survived, how he escaped, and whether it was the destruction or something else, too terrible to remember, that had finally stopped his hearts.
00. He drifted for months through the remnants of the Time War before finally, reluctantly, acknowledging his own survival. The name he took back from the legends of his own life fit painfully over the scars of his deed. In the end he took it because he could -- and because in filling a minute part of the hole he had left in the universe, his smallness and singularity remained as eternal proof that the hole was there. More title now than name, it stamps his activities so indelibly that he scarcely hears it at all.
Who, they wonder? The Doctor.
Someday, perhaps, he will remember to wonder too.
OK, that's it for tonight. Next post may contain actual content. Ye cats.